What does the rest of the audience make of the show you’re watching? Beyond the odd gasp or laugh it can be hard to tell but this audacious, tech-savvy production by devised theatre company The Paper Birds repeatedly measures its impact. We use our phones throughout and, when prompted, select from a number of responses about how the scenes make us feel.
It’s a test of empathy and, initially, preconceptions. This is a tale of forced displacement, we are told. Where might the story be set, why has the character left home and how old are they? The screens on stage, within a temporary shelter designed by Imogen Melhuish, reveal our range of assumptions. A later series of skits will suggest how they have been influenced by the media.
Three performer-devisers, Lil McGibbon, Daz Scott and Kiren Virdee, share the role of a nameless displaced person yet withhold most of their personality. They strap on rucksacks, keep moving, enter a bureaucratic processing system and reach temporary accommodation. The sequence of events is familiar but the question the show raises is how different approaches to framing the journey may raise our level of empathy. The task of cutting through statistics, and how to recognise the plurality of displaced people’s experiences rather than highlight one individual’s, is continually raised. But does representing this largely through wordless physical theatre begin to help us understand or distance us from the character?
Feel Me has a questing and provocative approach but the result is often more contemplative than emotional. The use of comedy is uneven – a satire of headlines about refugees is a stinging rebuke of othering but the curiously jaunty scene, with muzak, in a queue for accommodation strikes the wrong note. The closing acknowledgment, in which the trio voice unease at exploring the subject without lived experience, would be better placed earlier in the story and more fully explored.
Writer-director Jemma McDonnell and co-director Kylie Perry’s dynamic multimedia production, which includes live-filmed sequences, succeeds most in presenting these questions for a young, digitally fluent audience (it is recommended for over-13s). The interactive elements work seamlessly throughout and it boldly ends by asking the audience to rate its overall impact, revealed on screen.
The results suggested my fellow theatregoers had more of an emotional response to an inventive, well-performed show that ultimately made me think rather than feel. It is a fascinating experiment but the journey taken by an Afghan refugee family in The Boy With Two Hearts, at Wales Millennium Centre in 2021, proved the power of traditional character-driven drama as an empathy machine.
At Stephen Joseph theatre, Scarborough, on 28 February. Then touring until 1 May.
